A man who knew too much about the horrors of tyranny and human bondage, and consequently more than most about the precious value of freedom, has departed this life.

Dith Pran was the courageous New York Times photojournalist who remained in his Cambodian homeland after the Khmer Rouge seized control of that country in 1975. Pran was subsequently captured by Pol Pot's barbarous communist army and placed in a concentration camp, from which he escaped four tormented years later and slogged through corpse-strewn swamps and impenetrable jungles until he reached safety in neighboring Thailand.

The 1984 film, "The Killing Fields," a term coined by Pran, depicts the ghastly genocide under which he suffered and heroically fled. Two million of his countrymen — a third of Cambodia's population at the time — perished in what was among the most grotesque socialist experiments of the 20th century. 

Pran spent the rest of his life in America, working for the Times and launching a "one-person crusade" to raise awareness about the plight of Cambodia, and warning of the unspeakable inhumanity that lurks when reason and respect for individual life give way to collectivist Utopian delusion. (Note: The United States government, at the homicidal direction of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, bears a permanent stain of guilt for stoking the fires of holocaust that ultimately engulfed Cambodia.)

Tragically, the man who won 1984 Best Supporting Actor for his absorbing portrayal of Pran in the film, Haing Ngor, himself a survivor of the killing fields, was murdered on the streets of Chinatown, Los Angeles, less than a month before his fifty-sixth birthday in 1996.

Pran died of cancer in a New Jersey hospital on Sunday.